The B.C. government likes to boast that the province's personal income tax rates are among the lowest in the land, if not the lowest. Expect to hear it repeated a lot in TV ads over the coming weeks, when the legislature reconvenes in February and when the 2013 provincial budget is tabled.   On one level they're right. On...

Rosemont residents will have a chance to see the plans for the skateboard park proposed for Art Gibbons Park (a.k.a. Rosemont Park) at a public meeting on January 24. The meeting, to be set up in an open house format, will start at 7pm at the Rosemont School. The event will give residents an opportunity to learn about the...

In this column I would like to share part of the speech I gave to those attending the “Open Forum” on a culture of peace and Department of Peace in Canada which took place in Ottawa early in November of 2012. Arms trade is big business – in 2010 total military spending in the world was around $1.6 Trillion.  According to the...

When Josh Fox received a letter offering him nearly $100,000 for the natural gas extraction rights on his Pennsylvania property, his first reaction was: nice chunk of change. Then he started wondering what was involved in the hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) process proposed.  Looking for the answer took him on a road trip...

Mark and Jane Andreychuk have decided to put their application to build a 56-metre dock at Willow Point Beach on hold. “What was shown on the application is not what we wanted,” Jane Andreychuk told The Nelson Daily today by phone from her home in Calgary.  “We didn’t take the time to look over it. It needs to be rethought....

The Frontier Centre for Public Policy recently released a policy study examining the system for testing organic products – or the lack thereof – in Canada. Authors Mischa Popoff and Patrick Moore drop the bomb on organic certification in Canada by revealing that organic crops are not systematically tested by the Canadian Food...

Hackers claiming to be associated with the internet activist group Anonymous have attacked the website belonging to the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) and hacked into the Twitter account belonging to Shirley Phelps-Roper, the Church's spokeswoman. The attacks are part of an operation dubbed '#OpWestBor' on Twitter and is in ...

Wally Oppal’s long awaited report commissioned in the wake of the conviction of serial killer Robert Pickton holds a surprise. Something had gone tragically wrong with law enforcement. How else could one individual have murdered dozens of women in one location over more than a decade without being caught? That Oppal’s report...

Following the city’s overzealous and incorrect use of the Freedom of Information and Privacy Protection Act (FIPPA) to withhold letters that are clearly in the public’s interest and do not “unfairly” harm anyone’s reputation, I am left wondering what, exactly, remains in the five redacted lines in Coun. Kathy Moore’s letter...

According to a recent IPSOS poll “nearly one-half of online Canadians (45%) are now visiting a social networking site at least once a week, and 30% visit daily”; source:  http://www.ipsos-na.com/news-polls/pressrelease.aspx?id=5286. But what is regular use of social media doing for us? Are we more connected and thus happier? ...